First screened at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, "How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer" is a dramedy about three generations of Mexican-American women who are tired of not having a man around.

Written and directed by Georgina Garcia Riedel, who made her film debut as a tribute to her own grandmother, "Garcia Girls" stars America Ferrera before she got her "Ugly Betty" glamour.

The three generations of Garcia females - teenage Blanca (Ferrera), her divorced mom Lolita (Elizabeth Pena), who runs a butcher shop, and 70-year-old widowed grandma Dona Genoveva (Lucy Gallardo) - don't really do much but very, very tentatively work their ways toward a little male companionship.

To be fair, prospects aren't very good in their dreary Arizona border town, where all there seems to be to do is cruise around with men in one bad truck after another, including a newcomer with a bad rep (Leo Minaya) who is checking out Blanca. In a superexciting subplot, after buying a used car to jumpstart her life, Genoveva is taught to drive by her gardener, Don Pedro (Jorge Carver Jr.) and soon the two are catching the town's eye.

A depressed, divorced Lolita, on the other hand, has caught the eye of the owner of the video-shop owner (Steven Bauer) across from her butcher shop, but he's kind of a jerk. And in the meanwhile, she doesn't see how much her butcher Jose Luis (Rick Najera), who works in her shop, cares for her.

Of course, tensions rise between the women, too, but none that we haven't seen a thousand times before.

Garcia Riedel is affectionate toward her characters to a fault - cameras linger as they walk down the street or make other prosaic moves, dragging the already sluggish story's pacing even more - but she does get some lovely behavior out of each actress.

There are also some nice shout-outs to senior sexuality and a funny, split-screen confession scene, but they don't lend enough heat to this slow, simple "Summer."

-- Bob Strauss